Think about the most social person you know. The one who walks into a room and immediately has three conversations going. The one whose phone is always buzzing, who somehow remembers the name of the barista’s dog and the mailman’s daughter’s dance recital. Now think about someone else—someone quieter, maybe. The person with two or three friends they’ve had since college. The one who doesn’t show up to every gathering but will drive across the state at 2 a.m. if you call them crying.
We tend to think the first person is “good at friendship” and the second person needs to get out more. But what if that framing is completely backward?
There’s a growing conversation—backed by solid research—suggesting that people who struggle to make friends easily but hold on to a small number of deep, lasting relationships aren’t lacking a social skill. They have a different attachment style. And that attachment style isn’t a flaw. It’s actually shaping a kind of friendship that might be more protective, more meaningful, and harder to build than the one we usually celebrate.
This one has been rattling around in my head for weeks, so let me try to unpack it.
Your friendship blueprint was drawn before you could talk
I used to think I was just “picky” about friends. In my twenties, I’d watch other women effortlessly collect friend groups—brunch squads, group chats, a revolving door of social plans—and wonder what was wrong with me. I had a handful of people I loved deeply, and that was about it. Making new friends felt like trying to learn a second language in real time.
It wasn’t until I started reading about attachment theory—first through parenting books, honestly, because I was trying to understand how to build secure bonds with Ellie and Milo—that I realized my friendship patterns weren’t random. They were rooted in something much older.
Attachment theory, originally developed by psychologist John Bowlby, suggests that the way our caregivers responded to us as babies creates an internal blueprint for how we approach relationships throughout our lives. And while most people hear about attachment in the context of romance, researchers have found that these same patterns play out powerfully in our friendships too. Securely attached individuals tend to maintain broader friendship networks—around seven to eight close connections—while insecurely attached people often have just one or two.
That’s not a failure. That’s an adaptation.
Growing up, my family was loving in a practical, keep-things-steady kind of way. But deep emotional expression wasn’t really the language spoken in our house. Dinner happened every night, and I’m grateful for that. But conversations tended to stay on the surface. I learned early that closeness had limits—and I carried that invisible rule with me into every friendship I tried to build as an adult.
The acquaintance collector and the deep-diver aren’t playing the same game
Here’s what I find so fascinating about this research: it’s not that some people are “better” at friendship than others. It’s that different attachment styles lead to fundamentally different friendship strategies.
Someone with more avoidant tendencies, for instance, might have plenty of acquaintances but struggle to let anyone past a certain emotional threshold. They’re not antisocial—they might actually be quite charming in groups. But when vulnerability enters the equation, they instinctively create distance. As the LA Concierge Psychologist explains, getting emotional information out of an avoidantly attached friend can feel like pulling teeth, because closeness itself feels risky to their nervous system.
Meanwhile, someone with anxious attachment might invest incredibly deeply in friendships but live in a constant state of worry about whether that investment is returned. They’re the friend who notices you didn’t reply to a text for six hours and has already constructed three worst-case scenarios about what it means. Their friendships can be intense, loyal, and long-lasting—but also tinged with a low hum of anxiety that’s exhausting to carry.
And then there are people who are securely attached, who tend to navigate friendship with less drama and more flexibility. They reach out when they want to connect, they don’t catastrophize when plans fall through, and they can hold space for a friend’s messy emotions without it destabilizing their own sense of self.
None of these patterns are destiny. But they help explain why your friend with three close people she’s known for fifteen years and your friend who has two hundred Instagram contacts she texts regularly are both doing “friendship”—just in completely different ways.
Fewer friends doesn’t mean lonelier
This is the part that really challenged my own assumptions.
We live in a culture that equates being social with being healthy. The person with the packed calendar and the wide circle gets praised. The person who spends Friday nights with the same two people they’ve known since high school gets side-eyed, or at least gently encouraged to “put herself out there.”
But Oxford evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar—the researcher behind Dunbar’s number—found that our social networks are organized in concentric layers, and the innermost layer holds only about five people. These are the relationships where we invest nearly 40% of our total social effort. Everything beyond that inner ring gets progressively less emotional bandwidth.
In other words, even the most socially connected person on the planet has room for only about five truly intimate friendships. The rest are varying degrees of acquaintanceship dressed up as closeness.
So the person with two or three ride-or-die friends? They might actually be filling their innermost circle more intentionally—and with more emotional honesty—than the person who appears to have hundreds of connections but no one they’d actually call in a crisis.
I’ve experienced this firsthand. When I shifted into this natural-leaning, alternative parenting world, I lost some friendships. People I’d been close to during my teaching years just didn’t understand the choices Matt and I were making—the cloth diapers, the extended breastfeeding, the way I talked about screen time.
Some relationships faded quietly. A couple ended with real friction. It was painful. But what surprised me was that the friendships that survived became stronger, more honest, and more sustaining than the wider circle I’d had before. My closest friends now are a small mix of former teaching colleagues and mom friends I’ve met along the way, and I’d trust any of them with my kids, my worst day, or a 2 a.m. phone call.
What this means for how we raise our kids
Now here’s where my brain goes as a parent, because of course it does.
If attachment styles shape the friendships our kids will eventually build, then what we’re doing right now—in these early, messy, exhausting years—matters more than any social skills class or playdate schedule ever could.
This is backed by research published in Frontiers in Psychology, which found that attachment styles have a broad influence on how people experience social interactions in everyday life, shaping everything from emotional responses to how they interpret ambiguous social cues. Those patterns don’t just appear in adulthood. They’re forming now, at our kitchen tables, during bedtime, in the way we respond when our toddler reaches for us after a fall.
Ellie is five now, and she’s one of those kids who makes friends everywhere she goes. She’ll chat with the checkout lady at the farmers’ market, befriend a kid at the playground in three minutes flat, and come home talking about her “new best friend” whose name she’s already forgotten. Milo, at two, is different. He’s more cautious. He watches. He clings to my leg at group gatherings and needs time before he’ll engage. Neither approach is better. But they each need something slightly different from me.
For Ellie, it’s helping her notice quality alongside quantity—gently pointing out that a friend who shares her feelings back is different from one who just wants to play the same game. For Milo, it’s being his steady base, not rushing him to engage, and trusting that his cautious way of entering the world is his nervous system doing exactly what it should.
What I try to do for both of them—and I say “try” because I get it wrong plenty—is model what secure connection looks like. That means letting them see Matt and me be honest with each other. Our nightly check-in after the kids are in bed—”How was your day, really?”—isn’t just for us. It’s teaching them, even indirectly, that closeness means showing up with what’s real, not just what’s pleasant.
The friendship you build slowly might be the one that saves you
I want to come back to something that gets lost in the conversation about attachment styles: having a less conventional friendship pattern isn’t a diagnosis. It’s information.
If you’re the person who takes a long time to warm up, who has two close friends instead of twenty, who feels overwhelmed at big social events but comes alive in one-on-one conversation—that tells you something useful about your nervous system and your history. It doesn’t tell you that you’re broken.
As Dr. Amir Levine notes in his book Attached, people with secure attachment styles tend to seek out social support and perceive themselves as having more of it available, while those with avoidant attachment are more likely to create distance under stress. But here’s the part that matters for real life: awareness changes things. When you understand why you pull back, you can start making different choices—not by forcing yourself to be someone you’re not, but by building trust at the pace that actually works for your wiring.
I think about the women in my babysitting co-op—three other families we trade off with regularly. Those relationships didn’t form overnight. They were built slowly, over shared afternoons and honest conversations about the parts of parenting that feel impossible. And because they were built slowly, they hold weight. When I had a particularly rough stretch with postpartum anxiety after Milo, it was those women—not my wider circle—who showed up in ways that mattered.
A few closing thoughts
I used to feel quietly ashamed of how small my social world was. I’d see other moms with these big, bustling friend groups and think I was doing something wrong. That maybe if I were warmer, funnier, more easygoing, I’d have what they had.
But the more I learn about how attachment shapes our relational lives, the more I think the question isn’t “how many friends do you have?” It’s “do the friendships you have make you feel safe enough to be fully yourself?”
Because a friendship that lasts decades—one where you can show up uncombed and crying and know you won’t be judged—that’s not a consolation prize for people who can’t do big social circles. That’s its own kind of remarkable.
And if you’re raising a child who seems to connect that way—slowly, carefully, with a few people rather than many—maybe the most helpful thing you can do isn’t push them toward more. Maybe it’s sit beside them in the quiet and say, “The way you love people is a good way.”
That’s what I’m trying to do. Imperfectly, as always. But with intention.
